An Interaction Control Architecture for Large Chairperson-Controlled Conferences over the Internet

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach for interaction control in large, synchronous and loosely coupled but chairperson-controlled conferences. Based on the IP-Multicast protocol which is extended by mechanisms allowing resource reservation for prioritized flows, the proposed architecture supports interaction control among conference members as well as focus control of each conference participant.

Interaction control is performed by using a scalable signaling protocol: a conference may be recursively split into sub-sessions each of which provides an identical functionality independently of the others and establishes a singular session. A session is controlled by a chairperson who manually grants, revokes or rejects an interaction request of a registered session member. The granted interaction is announced to the session participants such that all participants may have their focus automatically set to the audio and video streams providing session participant.

The such provided focus control enables conference participants to individually manage their own audio and video stream perception, i.e. a participant either decides individually to whom the personal attention should be granted or follows strictly the session’s focus granted by the chairperson.

The proposed conference control architecture provides the network-management platform to large virtual classrooms for university-like lectures over high-speed Internet-connections.

While focusing the application of the conference control architecture to university-like lectures, it remains generally applicable for any audio- and video-supported chairperson-controlled conference over the Internet.